Counting Seconds
by Mellifluousness
Summary: Suicide attempt number six thousand, eight hundred and thirty-three: drowning. Again. So you get up to some interesting things when you're immortal.


**A/N: Greetings, Internet! Mellifluousness here with a oneshot inspired by something that I forget. It's not vent-writing, though, so don't worry.**

**Title page was drawn by me. Do enjoy. c:**

Suicide attempt number six thousand, eight hundred and thirty-three: drowning. Again.

Okay, so it hasn't worked the past twenty-two times, but I'm doing that optimism thing once more and where's the harm in trying? I can do pretty much everything else, so why wouldn't I be able to drown myself if I kept at it? You can do anything if you put your mind to it!

Like being immortal. I've got that down pat.

I'm sitting on the shore currently, recording it. The suicide, that is, not the immortality. Like I don't know about _that. _I like recording things because I like numbers, and I like to be exact, and it irritates me to no end when days blur together so I try every way I can not to let them. It's not like I know what numbers are, really, or how to write, but I've made my own system! I can create anything I see, anyway. Put your hands together, wiggle your fingers and _bam! _Instant book and quill! It's really useful. I used to think it was the greatest thing ever, back when I thought everything was. Now I don't really care.

Okay, so, funny story about how I saw my first book and quill. I was walking, right, on… yeah, the edge of a deep ravine, and suddenly CRACK! The ground fell out from under me! I panicked like a nong and fell twenty-three blocks. It's no bigger deal than falling one hundred and three blocks, don't worry.

So I was lying in the dark checking my limbs were still attached (young and stupid as I was, like a fall of twenty blocks could even scratch me) when suddenly a light flickered on! Turns out I was in a passageway of weird old stone, and there was a torch four-and-three-quarter blocks from my head in an iron brazier. Under it was this ancient dusty chest. So I got up and dusted myself off and heaved it open, and what do you know, there's a book and quill inside it!

Yeah, you had to be there.

That was where I got my scribblings from. They were nonsense to me at first, but I changed them around and made them work! At first I used lines to count, but that started getting impractical at nine hundred and fifty-eight when it took up two pages and four and a fifth lines. So I made scribblings! Lots and lots of scribblings. They make sense to me, as they are symbols and representations and bits of the people's souls. That's what I've noticed, see; when they die, they leave behind glowing green bits of their souls. The green people who look like me (you call them zombies), the green people who don't (creepers), the white people (skeletons), and all the rest of them have little soul-capsules in their chests and when they die, they break. They are so beautiful!

I don't think mine can break.

That's getting negative again, isn't it? We're not doing that. Not the negativity thing. There is a _possibility _that mine can break, and that is why I keep trying to kill myself! I know how that sounds because all the people are devastated when one of them dies, but I don't hate myself or anything. I know I am good! I'm just bored.

I was meant to do great things, you know. I was meant for something huge and exciting! But I've spent two hundred and nineteen thousand, four hundred and fifty-seven days trying to figure out what my great conflagration was meant to be and I think I ran out of energy at some point. The people sleep and eat and die, but I don't! I used to love so many things and I used to do so much, but I've forgotten what I loved now. Doing things feels pointless.

I _hate _feeling pointless!

Somewhere along the line that made me scream and cry and try to rip myself apart. That worked about as well as you might expect. Not at all, I mean. The only ones I hurt were the people, with fire and blood and dust, and my skin remained as perfect as ever! So I'm doing the optimism thing. Anything's better than hurting the people. They are so strange, with their hisses and clicks and grunts and barks and clucks and moos and oinks and baas and things. I don't understand a word of it. They're so loud in the noises they make to each other, and I can't make a peep! And I can't eat or drink or feel pain or feel texture or do anything and I'm _pointless _and

Wow, okay, that's enough, me.

Enough reminiscing, too. Back to the shoreline! I'd say the sand is gritty and uncomfortable on my bare skin, but I can't feel it so it isn't. Duh. Attempt number six thousand, eight hundred and thirty-two was swimming in lava. It did nothing but burn off my clothes. It's not the first time that's happened, but I don't care enough right now to create some more so I'm sitting here wondering if the sun is warm and the sand is gritty and the water can break my soul-holder finally. At my back black sand rises exactly three blocks to the forest, which is resplendent in green with the recent rain. I think rain was one of the things I used to like. Or maybe I hated it. Before me stretches the ocean, glittering to the horizon where it falls off the edge of the world only it doesn't because I've been there and it's just more land. Yeah. I don't think the world has an edge!

I think I have a good symbol for drowning. It is me, sitting cross-legged under a squiggly line with my eyes closed. Unfortunately it takes a while to draw, so I'll simplify it when this doesn't work. I mean if! _If _it doesn't work. There is an equal chance of either possibility! I've got to keep that in mind.

Close the book. Store it. From the same space I can pull things I have seen, I can also put them back for safekeeping; that way I always have my records! Just in case it doesn't work. Not because I know it _won't _work. It's just a precaution, right? Just a precaution. So I pull my hands apart and wiggle my fingers and the book is stored. And there is as much chance that I won't need it again as there is that I will need it!

I need to stop thinking or I might scream. Or do something even stupider. So I stop my brain like I've trained myself to do for four thousand and thirty-seven days, and I jump into the air. I float on the spot for eight and a half seconds. Then I'm rising to a good height of eleven blocks and five and a half tenths, and angling myself until I'm horizontal. Arms by the sides. Feet meeting in a point. Head up just enough to see.

I take off.

It's easy enough to reach a speed of eighty-and-three-quarter blocks per second. Tiny waves turn into sparkly streaks below me. I will need to travel for- oh, I'm there. I halt in a quarter of a second and resume a vertical position, holding out my arms and legs like I'm treading water even though I'm not and this takes no effort and that's a dumb and pointless thing to do. Below me is a streak of water about as black as the innards of a cave.

I angle myself so I am facing downwards and streamline again. At the same speed I hit the water.

_SPLOOSH. _It roars in my ears like… I don't know, a roaring thing. Maybe that is what a heartbeat sounds like. Down, down, down, the water a quick gradient from cerulean to pitch. My ears don't pop. My lungs don't strain. I don't feel like I'm being crushed by the pressure.

That's sure not a good start.

I can see nothing in the blackness down here, not the walls of this deep-sea ravine, not my hands in front of my face, not my streaming unkempt hair. I bet I could do with this wash, though. I slow as the darkness deepens, since there's really no rush down here; it is eternity before an outstretched hand informs me that I have reached a surface without giving me any sense as to its texture. I angle again until I am feet-down and settle into a layer of silt halfway up my calves. Yuck. I thought this would be more pleasant. My hair is no doubt streaming, some big gross cloud billowing sixty-two percent of my height into the water above me. It'll settle around my shoulders slowly, perhaps. I extend my arms, sluggish for once, and my useless perfect skin registers that yep, that's water alright. Water and muck and murk.

I'm not floating. I never float.

I take my legs out from under me and sink until I am sitting cross-legged in the silt. It's now… just above my waist? I can't gauge it properly in the dark.

I sit.

I wait.

I used to want to do everything _right now. _Not so much anymore. You get over that, you know? You grow up! And when you're immortal, you get really, _truly _patient. You sit for days watching a tree grow into a sapling, feeding it bone meal at just the right stages. I used to love doing things like that. Watching things come to life, and grow, and thrive under my hands!

Then I realised they can do that on their own.

I liked a lot of things when I was young. I liked making up scribblings. I played charades with the green people. I made myself scared! I made obstacle courses spanning countries, filled with thrills and the rush of adrenaline. Flying, once, was amazing, and I could do that for hours.

Then it stopped being frightening.

Oh, and building! Once I saw enough things I could create them with ease, and I used them to make constructs I could never conjure up! Huge castles and towers and flying machines and ships and libraries and things.

Then I realised they were empty.

I think in pictures and clucks and clicks and grunts, but I can't say a word. I found out once that all the people come from mothers or eggs or dust and death, but I… one moment I wasn't, and the next I was! I'm obviously not like them. When I took them down to the depths of the ocean their eyes bulged and they bit and kicked but I am immortal and also too strong for them and then it was dark. When I came back into the light they were grotesque! They made me screech and throw them.

Sometimes I liked it when they fought.

And I tried it in surface pools, when I was in that phase. I took one of the people, a creeper, and I held it under the water. The same thing happened! Only it didn't end up ugly like the ones I took to the depths. Just blue. And very dead. I didn't like it as much.

I kept experimenting. I just wanted to know how I was supposed to react to these things! To swords and magma and water and heights and speed and fire. The more I did it, the more I liked it. The more I liked it, the more I did it.

It's a good thing I got myself out of that, right? Haha!

I sit in the dark and count milliseconds.

People don't live long. Some for as little as one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five days; some for more thousands of days; and the tall black people, endermen, and zombies and skeletons can last maybe half as long as me! But they have purposes. They have people like them, people they can jabber to in their weird tongues. They can't create like me, but they can die! They're not perfect, made instead of rot and scars and chipped bones. I envy them. Sometimes I used to anger them so they'd attack me, mar my skin and rip me to shreds like I couldn't do myself, but it never worked! They could touch me and I wouldn't feel it at all! They wouldn't leave a mark! I couldn't feel anything and I couldn't stay anywhere because I would grow to love them and then they would die. Maybe I can't love anything anymore. Maybe I was never meant to love anything.

Now that is _not _optimism.

How can I be optimistic down here in the dark and the dreadful silence and the not-cold and the unfeeling? I am older than the biomes, as even they grow and change and die! I don't die! The weight of the ocean should have made me pixels thick by now and it _hasn't _because it never _will _because I can't _die _I can't **_die_**I can't **_DIE_**_. _

_WHY CAN'T I DIE?_

I'm going to _BURN _this useless ocean! I rise in a vortex of silt and water and I turn it to magma with clawing fingers. When that threatens to cool I force it _HOTTER. _The depths are illumined in unnatural orange, my contorted face no doubt demonic in the dark! But still it _DIES. _I cannot keep it up and it _DIES. _Obsidian tendrils are all that is left. With my hands I kill them too! With sweeps and silent roars I _RAZE _the ravine, I _RIP _its sides to _SHREDS, _and I tear into the open wounds and _WIDEN _them and wish the rock would _SCREAM _for me_. _I do not angle myself but rather just _STOMP, _and beneath my feet imperfect stone crumbles for _BLOCKS_ and _BLOCKS_ and I don't _CARE _how many! I _DIVE _I _RIP _I _TEAR. _I turn this hole into a crater, into a wound to pierce the _BONES_ of the earth. _DOWN _and _DOWN _into darkness I care not for. _DOWN _and _DOWN, _where neither rock nor iron nor diamond can halt me. _DOWN _and _DOWN _and-

This stone slows me. It is too dark to see it, but it simply enragesme further! _DIE, DIE, DIE. _I rip. I tear. I claw. I scream but it makes no noise. And like everything else, it dies.

The cold makes me gasp.

I don't feel cold. I don't feel heat. Is this what chill feels like? Shards piercing my exposed palms and face? It freezes my ire and sticks my eyes with needles. The hole in the stalling-stone glows slightly, and I can see its rough texture. The water isn't flowing through it.

Slowly, slowly, I descend. Hands gripping the bottom edge of the hole, gently pulling my body through, aligning horizontally in the… radiant… darkness beneath. Really, although it must be the deepest pitch I've ever seen, it glows. I can see dust, huge flat particles of it, dancing in pillars and spires. To my left and to my right, before me and behind me, stretches this huge flat plane of stalling-stone, shifting nary a pixel.

It is cold.

It hurts.

I can hardly believe it.

Maybe, just maybe, this is where I'm meant to be! Maybe I was meant to find this place, or not-place I suppose. Maybe this was meant to happen.

Slowly, face-first, I descend. Chill deepens. Pain grows. And always, I am reaching out a hand, stretching for this void; I am beckoned by its silence and its sharpness.

I can feel my hand beginning to turn to dust.

It shears off my fingertips and works upwards, matching me for pace, gently-viciously taking me apart, reducing me to ones and zeroes.

There comes a point where I know if I go any lower I'll…

Die.

I stop.

I've lived for what I don't know amounts to six hundred years. Six hundred years of pointlessness. I can't keep being pointless. I have no purpose. Death will be the rest I need.

So why have I stopped?

Dust flurries around me, like it's urging me to hurry up and fall. Or maybe to stop, and go back up, and search a little longer. Maybe it's telling me that whatever I find will be worth the wait.

Maybe it knows I'm sure that's a lie. Why haven't I found it already? What's taken so long?

Maybe I spent too much time looking for ways to die and not enough looking for a purpose.

But I _did_ look. I searched for decades.

And?

Blackness beckons me.

And… and I'm tired of searching! I'm just tired.

So why not wake up?

By now I'm not entirely sure if I'm talking to myself or someone else entirely.

Maybe all it takes is looking up.

I do so. Above me, many eternities in distance, remains a little hole in the black expanse; it drills up through the deepest parts of the ocean and leaves the sun a tiny brilliant speck in its very centre. Below me, not pixels from me, is the sharpest part of the Void. Right now, I could die. I could make this the last of my six thousand attempts.

Or not.

It would not take half a second to let myself fall, you know. And yet it would take so many to reach the surface again, to resume my search; what if I find nothing? What if what if what if.

What if there's no rest in death?

I haven't known a risk in a long time. I got past those. This might be the only real one I've ever faced, even.

What if death is just pain?

I closed my eyes exactly five seconds ago. It hurts to keep them open here. I breathe, and it's like my lungs are filled with blades.

I think I have made a decision.

Darkness and blackness and pitch and jet and void. Dust and claws and bone-aching cold. Loose limbs and billowing hair and pure, raw agony.

Brushing past rough rock.

Roaring water.

A quick gradient from glowing to nothing to blue, glorious blue. An almighty splash as I break the surface! Nerves jumping and jittering, _feeling _rather than registering warmth and the cool sea breeze. It whistles and skips about me, and it plays with my sodden hair! Oh, oh, the warmth of the sun, the cool of the breeze, my tingling skin. It was worth coming back up! It was worth it! I feel now! I can feel!

I skip across the waves, deserting the shore. Tilting and swerving, I run my fingers through the salty brine. It is cold! A beautiful cold, so unlike the chill of the Void; rather it's the cold of how lovely coruscant water is! I grin since I can't laugh in delight, and I race across the ocean since I've got to start looking somewhere.

How long will it take? How many more days will I search?

Now that's a discouraging thought. Hey, there's land on the horizon.

Eventually I reach it. Rolling plains stretch off into the distance, dotted with flowers and shrubs. A herd of brown-and-white people, cows, is not far off! They are funny and stupid. I maintain a height of five blocks exactly above the terrain, slowing a little so I can look for… what? What exactly am I trying to find?

What's my purpose?

Maybe I've just given up my only chance so I could look for nothing again.

Something is on the horizon. Odd sharp shapes, I think, of the same material that supports abandoned mine shafts. I don't really care. It's probably nothing, like it always is. Just one more "keep going" to stall my descent into the Void.

I look anyway.

A trail of gravel three blocks wide shortly begins winding in the general direction of the shapes, so I follow that at walking speed. The hills rise in that direction. I can't see anything clearly; how irritating! I can't be bothered rising any higher, though, so I keep going. Up and down and left and right and-

Suddenly I reach the shapes and pull upright. I've never seen anything like them! Slopes and walls of wood and stone, panes of something like more transparent ice, gravel trails and manicured plants all sheltered by a wooden barricade five and a half blocks in height. There is some kind of hole in it before me, and either side of it is situated a tower. Inside each tower…

There are people, only they look like me.

They see me and yell! I can only stare. They jabber to the ground behind them and to me, but I can't understand a word. More me-people come running, gaping up at me where I float, and I don't know whether to be stunned or break into a grin. Babbling me-people in all shades from pink-white to deep brown, of all shapes and heights they are. I drop like a stone six blocks to the ground, and stand nine and a half blocks from them.

One of the darkest, with long hair and a broad build, approaches with not wariness but curiosity in its eyes. It closes the distance between us a little slower than I'd walk. I don't know what to do! Will it jabber at me? I won't be able to talk to it! I just stand and stare. Thirteen-and-three-quarter seconds later it is a mere two and a half blocks from me, and stops. I think there is water roaring in my ears again. It speaks, and it sounds so strange; lilting and rolling, like a boat on the waves it is, yet choppy and jarring, yet syrupy and mellifluous! I open my mouth, but no words come out.

So instead I put my hands together, and I picture what I want, and I turn them over to reveal a rose as perfect as my skin. I take it by its thorny stem with shaking fingers and hold it out to the person.

It's gaping at me. For three slow seconds it too reaches out, taking the flower, turning it over and over in its hands. Then it looks up at me and smiles.

It turns back to its fellows and babbles. They cheer! I have no idea what's going on. It beckons me, gesturing towards the village, and then it turns and walks away.

I hesitate for eight seconds and thirty-four milliseconds. Should I follow? Should I flee?

Behind it the other people cheer and beckon.

I walk, and then I sprint, and then I'm flying amongst their awed gasps.

And I think the hope in the dust is skipping on my heels.


End file.
